To me, Borderlands 2 just looks like cel-shading but with a few texture and filter effects placed on top to make it look even more like a comic book (not meaning that as a way to say it looks bad, as it looks great to my eyes).

If there's something intrinsically different going on that I can't see I am genuinely interested in knowing about it.

Graveland wrote:
Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising is genuinely one of the best military FPS of this generation.

Now that's what I call an unpopular opinion!

For me, it was without exaggeration probably the worst game I've bought in the last 10 years.

i thought it was pretty decent. not great, but had some good times co-oping through the harder difficulties.

the sequel, red river, is much worse. imagine dragon rising, but with a levelling system, no encounters further than 50m away (in dragon rising you were dead if they got anywhere near 100m), and the most risible NPC ever shouting at your CONSTANTLY.

it has the most baffling ending, with shouty man briefly calming down to explain the horror of war. i should point out that he spends the previous 20 hours greeting every death with racist glee.

anyway, my unpopular(?) opinion is that skyrim is absolute dogshit anti-gaming. there's a brief few hours where the combat is nicely balanced, and your skills mean something, but everything after is just a mindless trudge. i spent over 100 hours on it because i have OCD, apparently.

@Mr-Brett I thought in cel-shading the surfaces that make up each object don't have any texture, just a single colour, which can get gradations due to lighting effects. In Borderlands surfaces do have textures, but these are hand-drawn rather than photographed, imported and adjusted.

Mr-Brett wrote:This is cel shading, also commonly known as toon shading.

Borderlands is 'shaded' just like any other game (more or less), it's just that the textures are heavily stylised.

So Cel-shading is a tech term rather than a style one? I always considered it to be interchangeable myself.

Yep, purely technical. These things have a habit of getting misconstrued when the games media hears these terms and latch on to them without fully understanding the meaning. We'll start to see shaders in the style of borderlands soon enough though. they just won't be cel shaders. There are tech demos of cross hatch shaders online if you're interested.

Anyway that's enough technical stuff, any more and vizzini might appear and bullshit up the thread.